How to build an “Off The Grid” Digital Music Source. Prevent Streamers from uploading info about your private NAS Music Library to their servers.

[KiranPS]

HI All,

I wanted to document my Off the Grid Digital Source for playing Music from NAS and local HDD after reading this.

This is a quote from “Danny Dulai - Roon Labs Founder ” for the Question
what information is Roon sending to the company servers about my music collection?
His Answer :
“Everything about the “files library” and “streaming library” minus the actual PCM/DSD content. For example: your streaming service stared music ids and region, file tags, file names, directory names, audio fingerprints, file lengths, hashes of the file content, etc.”

What information is Roon server collecting from me?

As noted above, your music collection does not qualify as your linked or unlinked personal data, nor is your play history or any other thing we collect about how you use Roon. This only applies to your “personal information”, “payment information”, and “location information” as per our privacy...

community.roonlabs.com

Even though I knew this to a certain extent , Direct admission that my entire collection's metadata would be uploaded ,was a little unnerving for me.

Now for the Build,
I needed a Streamer , Primarily Digital Source for my DAC, that should support playback from Local HDD, NAS with Folder Browsing and be headless and be controlled from a wireless tablet connected to a Private AP. I wanted it to stay off the grid ( Not connection to the internet ) for normal day to day use. I would Switch to an Internet Connected AP on the tablet to talk to my streamer to stream Spotify, Tidal and other Internet sources.



My Existing Solution and why I am ditching it.

1. I have been using RPI based streamers with software like VolumIO etc.
2. I Also Looked at moving to Roon (Privacy Issue see above).
3. Then I noticed that the software for streamers were slowly becoming nag-ware , spyware , premium ware etc .
   They also have Unattended software updates , have Untrusted Plugins for extended functionality etc (may be malware that install botnets) .
4. I also noticed, RPI does not have enough processing headroom compared to Intel x86 Boxes.
5. The primary reason I went for RPI was that they were fanless with good software support.

My Solution - Fully Off the grid Digital Media Source.

1. Use i3/i5 NUC , with the latest ubuntu minimal server.
2. Disable cloud-init and all services that need internet like AutoUpdate etc.
3. Any way I am planning to configure it with a different IP range with no gateway so it will hopefully never be able to reach the internet.
4. Install and configure mpd daemon and ympd for UI.
5. Setup Auto Mount of my NAS and Local HDDs.
6. If this fails Use private static ip series on the NUC and the tablet to make just them talk.
7. Add one extra IP on my NAS from this static IP series so that we can talk to it.
8. Setup web based admin to manage the headless server.
9. Install Avahi , MDNs to use .local names instead of IPs.

For Streaming Spotify etc I would use a traditional streamer that cannot see my local NAS.

I have detailed Commands and sequence to do this , let me know if this interests some Audio+ Linux enthusiasts and I can document this fully / upload the installed OS Image.

Please feel free to let me know if you are looking for something like this and face issues in setting something like this up.

Thanks,
-PSRK.

 

[bobbyndd]

Interesting. I am planning on taking a NAS since I am running out of space. I too perfer listening to my personal collection than streaming from online services. Your approach is something I need to consider when I get the NAS. I too use Roon and I guess what he meant by everything is things pertaining to Room music library contents like songs, metadata, tags, folder structure, album art etc. I don't think roon is accessing any data stored on other directories.